Editorial: Candidate's 'what if' says much about politics

Posted: Thursday, September 30, 2010

By

Whether one sees former state Sen. Eric Johnson's recent post-mortem of his failed gubernatorial campaign as a short course in practical politics or as a set of whiny excuses as to why he's not the Republican standard-bearer in November's general election, his observations offer a close-up look at the sorry state of the electoral process with regard to both candidates and voters.

Speaking last week to the Downtown Kiwanis Club in Savannah, which he had served as a state senator since 1994 before leaving office last year to seek the GOP nomination in the governor's race, Johnson offered a litany of reasons for his third-place finish in the crowded seven-candidate field from which former Congressman Nathan Deal emerged as the Republican nominee.

According to a Sept. 22 story in the Savannah Morning News, Johnson "said he might have won if he'd had an additional $250,000 for television ads in markets such as Augusta." He told his civic-club audience that he came into the race with far less "name identification" than such candidates as Deal, runner-up Karen Handel (who'd chaired the Fulton County Commission, a high-visibility office) and John Oxendine, whose service as state insurance commissioner was marked by his frequent appearances on TV newscasts from fire scenes.

"Money can buy you name identification ... because it lets you buy TV ads," he said, according to the Savannah newspaper. That's true enough, but think for a moment about what that says about the electoral process. First, it says political candidates are satisfied to get little more than their name in the minds of voters. Second, and quite possibly worse, it says that many voters might be going to the polls with little more than the quick impression of a 30-second TV spot - albeit one repeated ad nauseam in the days immediately before an election - as the basis for casting their ballots.

Johnson went on to say that he concentrated his TV buys on the Atlanta market, and thus didn't have much money left for ads in secondary markets. Which meant, of course, that he was cynically - if astutely - playing a numbers game with the voters, leaving downstate Georgians less of a chance than they otherwise might have had to learn something about him.

Also at the Kiwanis meeting, Johnson said that his polling "identified jobs as the key issue," and added that, armed with that information, his advisers told him to "see how many times you can say 'jobs' when you speak." At one half-hour event, he used the word 121 times, he said.

Again, take a look at what this vignette says about candidates and voters. Whether he might have had other ideas of his own as to the key issues the state should address, Johnson instead opted to be led, to at least some extent, by polling. The result, at least at the event he mentioned and possibly elsewhere on the campaign trail, was, again, a somewhat cynical - if astute - effort to tell voters what they wanted to hear. And, to the extent that they were satisfied by simple, direct, poll-determined messages, voters cheated themselves of hearing more of the candidate's own vision for the state.

It should, of course, be understood that Johnson's post-mortem likely would be echoed in large measure by anyone who has mounted a political campaign in recent times. We've all seen the style-without-substance TV ads run by candidates across the political spectrum, and newspaper editorial boards spend a lot of time trying to knock any number of candidates off their canned messages to get a look at the person behind the slogans.

What Johnson's recent speech offered us - candidates and voters alike - was a chance to take an unblinking look at the electoral process. Needless to say, it's not a pretty picture.